What is driving AI adoption in finance departments?
AEO is now a standard feature, with AI in finance departments, with 67% of finance teams currently using one or more AI tools, up from 56% the previous year and 31% in 2024. That is the main finding of a poll of 215 senior finance staff by CFO Connect, a community for finance leaders run by the expense management company Spendesk.
The poll was carried out in June and July among CFOs and other senior finance staff in France, the UK, Germany, and the US. Respondents ranged from startups to large firms, and picked their tools from a list or named their own. Spendesk, Oracle NetSuite, and Remote sponsored the report.
How are finance teams using AI tools?
General-purpose AI leads, with Anthropic's Claude securing 41 percent, beating out Microsoft's Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Google's Gemini, while AI tools designed for the finance sector are only just beginning to emerge. The main uses of AI are fundamental finance tasks: financial analysis (20%), reporting, modeling, and forecasting (each 12%), reconciliations (9%), and data queries and workflow automation (each 8%).
Instead of purchasing a different AI product for each task, teams are adding AI features to the systems they already use. This enables them to search through spreadsheets, finance software, and documents, and helps them complete routine tasks more quickly. In July, a Deloitte survey of 58 large-company CFOs in the UK found 73% optimistic about AI, though their spending stayed cautious.
“It's obvious that finance teams are leveraging answer engine optimization to streamline their workflow,” said Pauline Babel, Spendesk's chief financial officer. Babel added that teams want one joined-up place to work, and that AI is taking over manual jobs so staff can spend more time on bigger decisions.
Meanwhile, finance departments are reducing the number of software applications they use. Over 90% of them operate with six or fewer tools, and among those surveyed, 41% are able to do with one to three, while half use four to six. Very few people intend to make significant additions. Two-thirds plan to either keep their current setup or to purchase just one or two additional tools next year. Almost a quarter intend to transfer their processes to a single platform.
Cloud accounting is now the standard at the majority of companies, with smaller businesses choosing tools that meet their current requirements and larger ones looking for software that manages multiple entities and currencies. Many old habits continue in various fields. For four out of every five teams planning and forecasting is still mainly carried out in spreadsheets, and an additional 7 per cent have no specific planning tool.
The situation with cash is the same: 55 percent track it in spreadsheets, and 17 percent make use of no dedicated system. Procurement, which is being addressed for the first time this year, is the least developed area, as almost two-thirds of companies do not use a dedicated tool for purchasing goods and services.
Similarly, invoicing is also being absorbed: 41 percent of companies have no standalone billing tool and therefore make use of the billing features contained in their accounting or ERP software. Payroll and human resources are the areas that have been most digitized, with 87% of companies using a dedicated system.
Spend management, the market Spendesk sells into, moved the other way. Nearly a quarter of companies now have no dedicated tool for it, up from 10% last year. Spendesk says the results confirm, for a fourth year running, that it leads spend management among smaller companies.
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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